One of the most persistent myths is one that’s been particularly and doggedly resistant to evidence, science, clinical trials, epidemiology, and reason. It’s also a myth that I’ve been writing about a long time. Specifically, I’m referring to the now scientifically discredited myth that the mercury-containing thimerosal preservative that used to be in quite a few childhood vaccines causes autism. The myth began in the late 1990s and was later fed by the publication of David Kirby’s book Evidence of Harm, which was basically a paean to various brave maverick doctors who promoted the claim that mercury in vaccines cause autism. Among the “scientists” promoted by David Kirby were the father-son team of Mark and David Geier. Mark Geier is a physician who also has a PhD and represents himself as a medical geneticist; his son David has no medical degree, leading to my wondering from the very beginning how it was that he got away with helping his father evaluate and treat autistic children, in essence practicing medicine without a license.

The Geiers are most infamous for their “Lupron protocol,” which I first learned about back in 2006. As I wrote about it in 2009, when the mainstream media finally noticed the Geiers’ dubious medicine and how they were franchising it to different states, it was chemical castration for autism. The short version is that, somehow some way, Mark Geier got the idea in his head that testosterone contributes to autism. That in and of itself isn’t woo, given that scientists have from time to time hypothesized that very thing. What made the Geiers’ conclusions pseudoscience is their explanation. Basically, Geier claimed that testosterone binds mercury from vaccines, making it more “toxic” to the brain and also making it harder to get rid of the mercury using chelation therapy. Never mind that the only paper showing testosterone binding to mercury did it in benzene (hint: your blood is not benzene) under extreme conditions. What was worse, however, was the Geiers’ “solution” to this problem, which was to add to the autism quackery known as chelation therapy another potentially harmful form of quackery, namely chemical castration using Lupron, a drug that shuts down the production of sex hormones, including testosterone. It’s a drug that’s used to treat metastatic prostate cancer, a treatment that replaced the old treatment for metastatic prostate cancer, namely surgical castration. (Not coincidentally, it’s also used to chemically castrate sex offenders.) Even worse still, the Geiers somehow got away with a highly unethical clinical trial in which they packed the Institutional Review Board overseeing it with their cronies, going merrily on their way offering an unethical “clinical trial” untouched and seemingly untouchable.(more…)